Person Shrugging Emoji
Raised shoulders and open palms: I don't know, I can't help, or it is what it is.
Try Person Shrugging emoji
Edit the text, then change the size.
Meaning & usage
What does the Person Shrugging emoji mean?
Raised shoulders and open palms: I don't know, I can't help, or it is what it is.
Resigned and often comic. It closes a topic gracefully, though it can look dismissive when someone genuinely wanted an answer.
How to use 🤷 naturally
Unanswerable questions, situations outside your control and comic resignation.
Hand gestures can be direct and efficient, which makes them useful in quick replies. Their tone varies across cultures and age groups, so a short accompanying phrase can prevent ambiguity.
From standard to slang
The history of 🤷
- 2016
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Person Shrugging was first defined as emoji in Emoji 3.0, dated 2016. Part of the rapid mid-decade expansion beyond the original mobile set.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
Both palms turned upward with the shoulders raised, the gesture the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ emoticon draws in text. The emoji arrived long after the text version.
- Today
How its use evolved
Unanswerable questions, situations outside your control and comic resignation.
Dates follow Unicode’s official Emoji Versions chart. Versions before Emoji 1.0 are labelled retrospectively. See the history of emoji.
In conversation
Examples of 🤷 in messages
These examples show the emoji in complete messages, where the words make its intended tone easier to read.
No idea why it works now 🤷
Asked twice, no answer 🤷
It rained. What can you do 🤷
When to use it
Using 🤷 clearly
Unanswerable questions, situations outside your control and comic resignation. It lands as person shrugging meaning or shrug emoji when the rest of the message supports that reading, and it is the surrounding words that do the deciding — so in a sensitive, professional or cross-cultural conversation, say the thing outright as well.
Common questions
About the person shrugging emoji
What does 🤷 mean in a text message?
Raised shoulders and open palms: I don't know, I can't help, or it is what it is. Resigned and often comic. It closes a topic gracefully, though it can look dismissive when someone genuinely wanted an answer.
Is 🤷 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are person shrugging meaning, shrug emoji, 🤷 meaning, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🤷 look different on another device?
U+1F937 identifies the emoji; the picture is a font, drawn separately by Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung. Only the artwork changes, never the character.
How do I copy and paste the person shrugging emoji?
Use the copy button at the top of this page. 🤷 is a character, not an image, so it pastes into messages, captions and filenames as ordinary text.
When was the person shrugging emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 🤷 as emoji in Emoji 3.0, dated 2016. Early emoji version numbers can be retrospective, so this date describes its place in the standardised emoji set rather than the first-ever appearance of the underlying symbol.
For developers
🤷 in code
Every value below is generated from the character itself, so it stays correct even where a file encoding cannot hold the emoji directly.
| Format | Value | When to use it | Copy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode | U+1F937 | The standard reference. Use it to search a character map or a spec. | |
| HTML (hex) | 🤷 | For HTML and XML. Safe in files that are not saved as UTF-8. | |
| HTML (decimal) | 🤷 | The same reference in decimal. Both render identically. | |
| CSS | \1F937 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F937} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%A4%B7 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F937
- Category
- Hands & Gestures
- Also known as
- person shrugging meaningshrug emoji🤷 meaning
Keep browsing